Dr. Eric Berg Is Wrong: Everything That's Counterintuitive Is Unhealthy @Dr. Eric Berg DC

Watch on YouTube · 2024-03-23 · 18 min

0:00 Hi everyone. As requested, I'm going to review a video by Dr. Eric Berg. The video is called Top counterintuitive health tips that are deadly effective. Before we start the video, I want to say that I like Dr. Eric Berg. He has a lot of helpful videos. I don't agree with all of them, that's alright. His overall message is correct. He's simply misinformed about some topics. I'm pretty sure that I will disagree with this one and that's because there's nothing counterintuitive that can be in any way beneficial for you. And that's because our intuition is only there to benefit us. If we don't listen to our intuition, then it can actually be deadly for us a lot of times.

0:47 the more i look at health the more that you cannot create health without stress and that's completely wrong stress is always bad for you stress only reduces your lifespan stress can never in any way be beneficial for you of course people usually say this because they believe that growing as in going to the gym and actually growing your muscles is beneficial for you even though it actually only destroys your health and reduces your lifespan they believe that stressing your body and adapting yourself to stress is healthy even though there's nothing actually healthy about it nothing in any way at all some bit of destruction you've heard the concept no pain no Yes, destruction, exactly. You only destroy yourself through stress. No pain, no gain. That's exactly what I was talking about.

1:43 You can absolutely make gains by adapting your body to any kind of exercise. Your body can adapt to a lot of stress. You can become more adapted to cold showers, saunas, anything. But every time you do this, you become unhealthier and reduce your lifespan. That's what people need to understand.

2:05 I have a great video about this topic actually, it's called hormesis. What doesn't kill you makes you weak and sick and that's because every time you in any way get injured, experience any kind of stress, your cells of course die, they try to of course also adapt to the stress. But that's why your lifespan is reduced and it always makes you weaker and sicker. Always. No exceptions. There's actually a great quote which I posted in my community tab a few months ago. Every stress leaves an inedible scar and the organism pays for its survival after a stressful situation by becoming a little older. People understood this back in the day.

2:47 even the doctors did nowadays you have a nonsense science a religious belief such as hormesis dr ronda patrick and all of these charlatans are promoting it stronger i mean what's up with that so today i'm going to do a little bit of a deep dive into this term hormesis now what is this term hormesis what does that mean it's a hormesis is literally just your body's adaption to stress it's never beneficial it's always unhealthy for you

[video] 3:14 I'm trying to describe two things that might oppose each other in outcome. And I'm going to give a lot of examples, but I think we all know that when we exercise, we're creating destruction in ourselves. And then the outcome of that is something that's stronger, it's healthier, it's more fit.

3:28 No, that's exactly your problem, Dr. Berg. You equate strength with health, even though They have nothing to do with each other. You can become more adapted to lifting man-made metal in a man-made building for no reason at all. That's what people do at the gym. You can bench press more and more weight for no reason. All that you do is reduce your lifespan by doing that. You can become more fit. That's never in any way gonna make you healthier. You will reduce your lifespan, which means that you will die sooner. Death is the unhealthiest state that the human body or any animal's body can be in. The longer you live, the healthier you are. Therefore, anything that you do that reduces your lifespan makes you unhealthier, because you die. I don't know how to make it any clearer. Death is of course unhealthy.

[video] 4:18 So hormesis is really about a controlled dose of stress and deep inside.

4:24 Yes, because too much stress kills you. You can't work out for 10 hours straight in a row or every day for many, many hours. But you can go to the gym an hour a day. You will be super stressed. You will reduce your lifespan by decades. You will sleep 12 hours a day. But you can do it to adapt yourself to the gym. That's what hormesis is. It's completely pointless and unhealthy, but you can do it.

[video] 4:52 We have this very interesting adaptation mechanism. And the system that actually is controlling this is part endocrine system and part autonomic nervous system. So both of these work together to help your body adapt to becoming stronger. And the key word is adaptation. And you probably heard of the concept of survival of the fittest. It should be called survival of those who can adapt the best. So with hormesis, you can adapt from various stresses, radiation, exercise stress, cold stress,

5:23 I don't know about radiation, but cold, stress also another example. A lot of people do cold showers and ice baths today. You can absolutely adapt your body to the cold and you can absolutely and for sure will reduce your lifespan by doing that.

[video] 5:38 Heat stress like sauna, things like that. Also reducing your oxygen and increasing your CO2.

5:44 Yes, there's even sauna competitions in Finland and all of those countries where it's cold, which is why people go into saunas. They crave the heat, the warmth so much. It's understandable. It's very depressing to live in such cold countries. A lot of those people are alcoholics. They do these competitions and a lot of them get heart attacks in the saunas because it's way too much stress for the body. too can create a hormetic effect and even various plant chemicals a lot of different insecticides pesticides and even fungicides of course they're in very very yes and you can also adapt your body to snake poison even you can take small doses and eventually you will be not necessarily immune to snake poison but you may be more likely to survive a bite from a snake but by poisoning yourself all of the time you destroy yourself and reduce your lifespan.

6:38 Every time you experience any kind of stress, you scar your body, you kill your cells, and you reduce your lifespan. Every single time. With the adaptation of snake poison, you could absolutely adapt to it, in case you ever get bit by a snake. It's most likely never gonna happen, except if your job revolves around it. But would it be worth it to reduce your lifespan by probably decades, just to adapt to snake poison? It's just stupid.

[video] 7:04 Low doses because they're meant to kill these small little insects. But when we consume them, we're creating a hormetic effect. So let's just take, for example, sulforaphane, like in broccoli sprouts or radish sprouts. What it does is it triggers certain proteins, certain chemical pathways. One protein that it triggers is called a heat shock protein that activates certain things that allow us to strengthen our detoxification enzymes. Here we are exposed to a small dose of a poison that strengthens our own

7:34 At least he admits that sulforaphane is a poison.

[video] 7:37 That's great.

7:41 No, not at all, in any way. The only thing that happens when you consume anything with sulforaphane is that your body tries to detox from the sulforaphane. That's it, it doesn't actually help you. And actually, according to the studies, It actually makes it even harder for you to detox in the future because you use up your white blood cells, for example, to detox from the sulforaphane. That means that there's less left to detox from anything else. It's horrible. The less you detox, the more likely you will be to detox when you actually need to detox. The more you put your body under stress, the worse it's gonna be, of course.

[video] 8:20 the liver we have these enzyme systems called phase one phase two detoxification where we can take a poison and turn into a harmless particle well guess what triggers that system the sulforaphane this poison you're causing all these different enzymes and proteins to then rebuild and repair and so the rebuilding and repair mechanism won't occur until you trigger it so in other words exercise induces micro inflammation that then allows our bodies to get rid of inflammation

8:45 It's funny that he calls it micro-inflammation. It's as if he doesn't want to say the word inflammation. You can say it as you always say it. Yes, exercise causes inflammation. Of course, it's alright to say it out loud.

[video] 8:56 This wild concept of starving our bodies, right? We call that fasting.

9:01 And all of a sudden... Wow, he also calls fasting starving. Yes, it's literally starvation.

[video] 9:06 All of these amazing things occur. Our brain cells start growing more, our mitochondria...

9:11 your brain cells start growing more when you're starving literally when you're starving while you're starving show me the proof of that starts increasing in number our immune system gets regenerated from new stem cells

[video] 9:28 new stem cells regenerated immune system proof i need proof what do you mean deepen our genes from years of adaptation the different mechanisms that were strengthened and created to counter starvation so we could survive because when you think about it starvation can kill you if you go on too long

9:46 short term it's amazing same thing with exercise right how is it amazing it's counterintuitive your intuition tells you not to starve because it's bad for you because it kills your cells it reduces your lifespan and that's because in nature if you don't have food then you're a loser you're a bad hunter you failed at life and nature punishes you by killing you if you don't eat for longer then you actually die as he said that's the ultimate punishment

[video] 10:16 you can over train to the point where you're completely dead right but just a little bit of exercise is really good same thing with what is so good about exercise name one health benefit of exercising just one cold therapy right i mean think about it's only so much time you're gonna be able to spend in this uh you know 35 degree temperature before you're gonna have problems each person has their own individual tolerance for certain stress they can

10:39 actually this reminds me of a video that i saw this is the video it's about him taking cold showers every day it's in german i will translate it for you we will quickly go through it the results are interesting he says that he was fit but had some problems with his respiratory system

11:03 He says that he can see that in his blood results. And this is the interesting part. He's saying that the immune system was activated and that's exactly what happens with cold showers and especially ice baths. Your body feels attacked. You can actually get an infection from the cold. That's also what happens in winter. That's why people get the cold in cold weather. That's why it always comes in winter. For the most part, of course, you can also get a cold in summer, technically. But people usually get sick when the weather gets colder, when there's no sunlight, and that's because they don't wear a scarf or a hat. When they go outside, a lot of guys like to act tough and then they are sick for days or weeks because they didn't wear warm enough clothes. That's what you gotta do when you live in cold climates. And if you're stupid enough to go into cold water like an idiot,

11:59 on purpose then your immune system will be activated all of the time you will produce well we'll see what he will say

12:12 Yes, exactly. The antibodies, the white blood cells have been activated because he's in the cold all of the time and the body feels attacked. And these guys don't even realize what they are looking at. They will actually come to the conclusion that it's somehow beneficial. I don't know how. Even doctors... who are very ignorant nowadays about health should understand that if your immune system is activated by something that you do, then it's bad, that you need to stop it right away. But for some reason, I don't know if it's some kind of ignorance, they just ignore it and just say, oh, your immune system was activated, which 100% proves that what you were doing was bad for you. But we will just, for some reason, for the video, go along with the idea that it's somehow good for you.

13:04 Exactly. When you have allergies, for example, that's when they increase.

13:10 It's just so crazy. It's just so crazy because everybody who has any idea about blood tests knows that this is a bad sign.

[video] 13:18 He says that it's better, but it's higher.

13:30 Never have I heard that before, only in this video. Every other time you go to a doctor and when it's high, they will say you need to get it lower.

13:43 Oh my god man, it's just so crazy and oh my god, oh my god.

13:51 And he says, if you continue for 30, 40 years, then you can imagine what, and then they have nothing to say. Because really, what does he even mean? He doesn't even understand what he means himself. If you do cold showers for 30 years, well, you're not even going to get to 30 years. That's the whole problem. You're going to become deadly sick.

[video] 14:08 Conversely, it is also the case that testosterone, i.e. the masculinity hormone, is also higher.

14:14 He says that his testosterone is higher now, obviously not by a lot, but your testosterone changes throughout the day, which means that if he would have tested him a few hours later or before, it could have been the same or even lower. It doesn't mean anything whatsoever.

[video] 14:27 I had read before that testosterone should be increased by this cold shower.

14:33 He says that he read before he started this torture that your testosterone could increase because of cold showers. The thing is also, which he doesn't understand, the doctor probably also doesn't know this, that testosterone is an antioxidant. It can also actually increase in your blood because it's fighting inflammation or more specifically the damage that you have done. The inflammation itself of course is healing the damage, but it helps along with the inflammation. which is why it lowers the inflammation indirectly.

[video] 15:02 It helps with the inflammation.

15:08 He says that your muscles will grow quicker if you have more testosterone. If you would be using it for the muscles, which he isn't in this case, he's using it to fight the cold. It's so stupid. This video is so dumb. I just had to show it. cannot create health just by being sedentary all the time and doing nothing that's literally how humans in nature live you can watch any kind of documentaries about so-called tribes of course they are also more modern today but still they live very more naturally than we do they sit around most of the day and the man go and hunt the food sometimes and they do that sometimes by just setting up traps they don't even do anything physical so to speak It's just such a joke.

[video] 15:54 There's some other interesting counterintuitive things about health too. And this is not a hormesis thing, but it's just very counterintuitive, right? Because we used to think that if we cut the amount of fat that we eat, then we will lose our fat. Well, we found that that didn't work.

16:05 Yes, and he's right about that. He says a lot of stuff which is right when it comes to diet. And also the thing about being sedentary, most people don't realize that being sedentary means that you don't do anything for six hours a day. That's it. That's the very definition of being sedentary. It's not about doing nothing or sitting around all day long. And this is exactly how humans live in nature. All of them, without an exception, are sedentary by definition. I'll stop the video here because all that he did was continue talking about medications and the diet. We already know what he thinks about those topics. If you've seen his videos, then you for sure know that he promotes eating quite a lot of meat, also vegetables. He's wrong about that, but right about the meat. He generally promotes eating a lot of animal foods and that's of course great. He's wrong about some specific topics.

17:04 Diet is of course what defines your health, which is why it's great that he promotes eating animal foods. And he also researched a lot of topics, but then again...

17:18 To be able to properly research, you need to be able to think for yourself. You can't do research and simply blindly believe, which I'm not saying that he does, but probably partly he does, what you're reading. You can't just read a study and believe that it's the absolute truth. And you can't read any research papers, any articles even, and just believe them. You need to read a lot of sources and really look deep into behind the biochemical mechanisms of what you're talking about. And when it comes to going against your intuition, then when we actually look at it, as we saw with the cold showers, and we can see that our immune system hates it, which means that our bodies hate it. Our bodies technically attack the cold. And that's because it really causes an infection in the body. And when we look at all of the other topics also, then we will always see, such as exercise, that your body hates it. It attacks it. That's why it creates the inflammation.

18:18 That's why it creates the immune cells. It's always about attacking what's harming your body. And everything that is counterintuitive is bad for your body. It's always an attack on your body. It's something that you should never do. Thanks for watching.